Teaching Next Generation Youth Importance of CDR Analytics

Walt Disney once stated, “Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long… We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths”.

Having the ability to educate students last week at Crete-Monee Middle School Career Day demonstrates Mr. Disney’s vision. Peaking curiosity of many students about Variphy’s mission (the ability to provide analytics and tools to Unified Communications professionals) was a very rewarding experience.

Speaking about the conglomerate known as Cisco and how they generated $48.7 Billion in 2016 FY and how that was a 3% growth over the previous year, fundamentally, allowed me to elaborate and teach the students what VoIP is and how it enables a short term ROI because the cost of routing calls is significantly cheaper than traditional legacy analog TDM/PBX systems. On that point, it also enabled me to speak vastly on the importance of Call Detail Records and by how analyzing the calls being made can provide a high level ‘big-picture’ view on productivity. My main point was to illustrate that “time is money” mentality when referring to how businesses function. This information is very important in order to allow business to determine the following:

• Are their employees being as productive as they should?
• Are employees misusing or abusing phone privileges?
• Are emergency calls being made?
• Are calls being handled according to the outlined call flow?

When we incorporate all that data it provides very useful information for businesses to run more efficiently. For example, Variphy Insight has the ability to determine summary information for various call scenarios over a specific time frame. As a business one important reason to know this is for staffing measures. If, for instance, at the 12 PM hour the receptionist has an influx of Answered calls, but the analytics also shows an influx of Abandoned and Voicemail calls increasing in parallel, the business can safely assume that yes the receptionist is doing their job, however there are more calls coming in for one person to handle around the lunch time hour. As a business, this is good information to determine if, perhaps, they should hire a backup receptionist to be able to handle the additional calls that are being missed.

As a final thought, touching back to Mr. Disney’s words, it is (or at least should be) rewarding to both student and teacher to spread the ultimate resource of knowledge. It is knowledge, none the less, that enables the blooming of ones curiosity in the first place…Isn’t it?